IBM

So, it's well known that a beta was released and that the project was killed after selling less than 50 licenses.

The Wikipedia article seems to give a good explanation of how IBM, SCO, Intel, and a few others were trying to build a unified Unix that worked across POWER, IA-64, and IA-32, but were undercut by late hardware and the rise of Linux.

What I'm wondering is how much of the work done made it into other projects? It looks like all the Itanium related stuff was abandoned.

Good collection of IBM docs at:
http://ps-2.kev009.com/

Device driver kit (and a bunch of other old stuff) at:
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/aix/itanium/developer/

The AIX/IPF stuff actually got further than commonly believed - it did ship in an RTM form, although only on an RFQ basis and with limited support ("Early Adopters' Release.") This was effectively equivalent to shipping AIX for PPC - it wasn't a beta (although there had been three betas prior to it.)

There were two major prongs to Monterey later on - UnixWare/ptx, for x86, and AIX/IPF, for Itanium. UnixWare/ptx was a project that added enhancements to UnixWare with Sequent's SCI (think Numalink) clustering technology, but it died before shipping; Sequent's scalable clustering tech later ended up in IBM Itanium systems running Linux. AIX/IPF shipped a small number of units; it included some fancy stuff, like the new unified driver model (UDI) that was supposed to take off for all UNIXes and reduce the need for significant driver rewrites when porting across UNIX iterations.

Prior to Monterey, there were some other fancy joint Itanium projects - SCO and HP worked on a system called Summit which was supposed to be one UNIX for all common hardware, including Alpha, MIPS, and the forthcoming HP WideWord, which ended up shipping as Itanium. Sequent and Compaq also collaborated for a while on an Itanium project called Bravo, which would have been built on a Tru64 base with Dynix/ptx components. Sequent ended up joining the Monterey alliance, while Compaq proceeded for a while with a straight port of Tru64, which was eventually cancelled.

There were also some other Itanium ports cancelled before release. Sun had a fairly complete Solaris port running in the lab, and continued to ponder the idea through at least 2004. Novell had an operating system called Modesto, which was a hypervisor-based OS that could run Netware 6 instances in isolated VM's, as well as isolating system services and applications; think IBM VM as the closest comparison point. Additionally, Fujitsu-Siemens planned to port its BS2000 mainframe operating system to Itanium, but it seems to have been cancelled in an early state of development.

Where to downlo^Wbuy .iso images and which itanium hardware is supported? EDIT: only if it belongs to abandonware category, otherwise please ignore my wish